As postseason play got underway across Division III last weekend, a shock result arrived via Wesleyan. Except the defending national champions didn’t steamroll a NESCAC foe. Quite the opposite happened.
The host Cardinals fell Saturday in the NESCAC quarterfinals 11-7 to Middlebury and now await a possible at-large bid on Selection Sunday. But Dave Campbell, head coach of the Panthers, felt the result didn’t come out of nowhere.
“Our guys know they can play with anybody in the country, but there’s a mentality we need to play with,” Campbell said. “We showed up and played with that against Wesleyan.”
It was almost a perfect storm for Middlebury, too, across multiple areas. Jake Madnick went an incredible 18-of-21 from the faceoff X and Tyler Bass made a career-high 17 saves in his sixth-ever start. Then on attack, the duo of freshman Tyler Forbes and junior A.J. Kucinski combined for seven goals and two assists.
“The kid can shoot, he knows how to find space, how to free up his hands,” Campbell said of Forbes. “Then A.J. has just gotten better and better as the season has gone on. He’s playing with more confidence, he’s a kid who doesn’t wow you when you watch him. He just understands the game so well and makes good decisions. We always joke that he has a quiet four or five points a game.”
So, what changed? As Campbell sees it, one of those top-10 results finally went Middlebury’s way. He said – though most coaches in and around the top 30 assert the same – the Panthers play one of the country’s hardest schedules.
Losses have come against Union, St. Lawrence, Tufts, Amherst and Williams – all programs that feasibly will be in the NCAA tournament. The hope, Campbell said, is it pans out come May.
“I’m hoping we derive confidence from those and that experience helps us this time of year,” Campbell said. “I always say to guys that I’d rather be winning games in May than in March. We always try to peak at the right time.”
But a trip to the lion’s den now awaits Middlebury, as it’ll face top-seeded Tufts in the NESCAC semifinals Saturday. The Jumbos already handed the Panthers a 23-14 defeat on April 20, and have won one all but one conference tournament since 2010.
To draw inspiration against the three-time national champions, Campbell hopes Middlebury can lean upon a 2017 NESCAC semifinal game. That’s when the Panthers beat then-No. 1 and undefeated Bates, 14-13.
Could a repeat be in the cards?
“A lot of things are going to have to go right,” Campbell said. “All we can do is focus on what we can control and our mentality and what we do and play our best game on Saturday.”
Cabrini a lock for at-large bid?
When Cabrini’s 2018 season ended with a NCAA tournament third-round loss to Wesleyan, the Cavaliers returned to campus in Radnor, Pa., and held their year-end exit meetings that Sunday night.
The seniors departed and the returning players stuck around for a bit longer. The message from coach Steve Colfer was clear: The days of the automatic qualifier from winning the Colonial States Athletic Conference were over. Cabrini, at least until 2021, couldn’t get an AQ as a probationary period for joining the Atlantic East Conference.
The path to an 18th straight NCAA tournament appearance would likely require going through Pool B, of which there’s only one selection this spring.
“We wrote up on the board, ‘no guarantees,’” Colfer said. “Every game is going to be magnified that much more because there’s no fallback position for us to stumble along the way and know we can play our way into the tournament through an AQ.”
“We really have emphasized the point of being 1-0 each day that we play,” Colfer continued. “You hear that a lot in sports, but really for us it took on a new significance because it wasn’t trying to string together enough wins in conference.”
So with Selection Sunday nearing, where does Cabrini stand? The Cavaliers are 16-2 going into Saturday’s AEC championship game against Gwynedd Mercy, with the only blemishes being losses to top-five programs Salisbury and York.
Colfer knows they’re in a good place, but even that comes with an asterisk.
“I won’t know if it all comes to fruition until Sunday night when they announce the tournament and we can breathe some that we accomplished what we set out to last May,” Colfer said.
Getting to this point has come with some adversity, too. Attackmen Timmy Brooks and Matt LoParo, both two-time All-Americans, are out with season-ending injuries. Midfielders Tyler Kostack and Nicholas Waligurski, the former an All-American, have also missed serious chunks of time.
Colfer is optimistic that his middies can return at some point, but that many blows takes a toll. Cabrini is still scoring 16.82 goals per game.
“It’s hard to take three offensive All-Americans out of your lineup and feel you don’t need to do different things,” Colfer said. “I would be lying otherwise. Programs like ours just don’t have guys like sitting around we can pluck off a tree and plug in.”
The Cavaliers’ defense has largely remained in tact, though, allowing 6.29 goals per game. That’s the third-fewest in Division III.
And now Cabrini, even with a wounded offense, hopes that at-large spot arrives.
“I think right now we’re in a good position,” Colfer said. “We’ll see.”